Mencia says: If you don’t like me, don’t come to my shows

By Jerry Fink (contact)

Wednesday, May 21, 2008 | 2 a.m.

It’s enough to blow the mind of Carlos Mencia, so many projects coming to fruition at the same time.

• His first Comedy Central stand-up special in two years, “Performance Enhanced,” aired Sunday.

• The fourth season of Comedy Central’s “Mind of Mencia” premieres at 10:30 tonight on Comedy Central.

• He launches an 80-city tour, “Bud Light Presents Carlos Mencia: At Close Range,” this fall.

• Two movie studios are working on projects Mencia says he will write, produce and star in.

And on Saturday he performs at the Palms in Las Vegas.

“The room is amazing,” Mencia said during a telephone interview from New York, where he was promoting his various projects on national TV shows. “I draw a lot of locals there. It has a different feel, like I’m performing more for Las Vegans than for the tourists.

“I get a great response from the audiences in that room. It feels fresh every single time I perform there.”

Fresh material is important to him.

“I don’t want to repeat the same stuff over and over,” he says. “I put pressure on myself.”

Keeping his material fresh is no easy task for a man who is in front of the TV cameras and onstage so much, not to mention all of the modern technology that spreads his material around, including YouTube, MySpace and iPods.

“The TV shows burn so much of my material,” he says.

And he doesn’t have a team of writers to continually update his stand-up routines.

“It’s all me,” Mencia says. “I’ve tried to have people help me out, but it never seems to work. Their heads and hearts are in a much different place than mine. My stand-up is my personal place. It’s all me.”

Mencia, whose topics often include race and other social issues, is one of the hottest comics in the country right now, but he’s not without his critics — including comics who say he “borrows” too heavily from other comics.

He responds by telling critics they aren’t forced to attend his performances.

“I’m just one of the guys out there. There’s a lot of comics, Larry the Cable Guy, Jeff Foxworthy, Carrot Top, juggling comics,” Mencia says. “If you don’t like my kind of comedy, go someplace else. Life is too short.

“I’m not a big fan of hockey. You know what I don’t do? I don’t go to hockey games. That’s how I fix that problem.”

Mencia is proud of his new special, filmed at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Fla., after returning from entertaining the troops in Iraq.

“I was in Iraq for a couple of months before I started writing and preparing for the special,” he says. “The show is reflective of what I did over there. It permeates the special. It touches a little deeper for me, goes to a lot of places I haven’t gone.”